Another laptop with an hyperTerminal was connected on the other side of the serial link.It did not see anything coming out of the serial link but the same funny characters I usually got from my embedded pc. I now can say it is issued by the "autoconfiguring devices" step.So why does the kernel not take into account the "console" instruction?Once booted, I tried a

Code Sample

getty -L -n -l /bin/bash 19200 ttyS0 vt102

and got a root shell in my Hyperterminal.The very same command after respawn in /etc/inittab from KNOPPIX does not do anything visible.Perhaps is there a problem during the boot process but as long as the boot messages are not redirected to the serial interface I won't be able to know what happens.

I eventually got a shell on my serial port thanks to bootlocal.sh inspite of getting nothing during the whole boot. I'll try curaga's proposal on Monday. By now I will describe my way to go around in case it can help someone.First of all I would say the kernel was compiled without the possibility of getting the console on the serial port for I read that it was not a default option.

I booted DSL CD on a regular laptop in which I had inserted my CF (with a PCMCIA adaptor). My CF was /dev/hde whereas the HDD of the laptop was /dev/hda (tricky...)After making a boot partition of 60Mb in /dev/hde1, another of 68Mb in /dev/hde2 (followed by a mke2fs), I made a grub Frugal install on hde1 with "3 ssh noeject acpi=off home=hde2 restore=hde2 opt=hde2"After that I mounted /dev/hde1 and I suppressed /mnt/hde1/boot/grub/device.mapI mounted /dev/hde2, created /mnt/hde2/opt and copied /opt/bootlocal.sh into it.I added

Code Sample

/sbin/getty -L -l /bin/bash -n 19200 ttyS0 vt102

in bootlocal.shThen I rebooted my regular laptop on its regular OS (which is Knoppix 5.1). In that configuration the laptop HDD was /dev/sda and my CF was /dev/hdaI guess this is the lucky part of the story for I am not sure of the way to fool grub with the devices

I suppressed sda from boot/grub/device.map,rerun grub-install,replaced hde by hda in boot/grub/menu.listAfter inserting the CF in my embedded pc, in spite of a blind boot, bash prompt appeared on the hyperTerminal. I could then give a password to dsl and get network access to the pc through ssh